“Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!”

All through England tonight, crowds (mostly boys) will be chanting this rhyme through the streets and setting bonfires, often involving effigies, or “guys,” of the supposedly wicked Guy (or Guido) Fawkes.

An unemployed Catholic ex-soldier, Fawkes was supposedly caught in the act of lighting the fuse to 36 barrels of gunpowder, loaded in the “undercroft” (cellar) under the House of Lords in the palace at Westminster, to blow up King James I as he opened the new session of Parliament. James’ growing hostility to Catholics was supposedly the motive.

Guy Fawkes Day isn’t what it used to be — and probably a good thing, too, since it was used for political purposes to whip up anti-Catholic hysteria among the lower orders. “A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope” is one of the milder verses in the Guy Fawkes chant.

In his memoirs, Douglas Gresham recalled that his stepfather, C.S. Lewis, never went out on Guy Fawkes Day; the burning effigies, he said, reminded him too much of friends’ corpses, smoldering, tangled in the barbed wire in No Man’s Land when Lewis was a soldier on the Western Front in World War I.

Of course, the hero of the Alan Moore graphic novel and its 2005 movie version, “V for Vendetta,” wears a Guy Fawkes mask and succeeds where Guy failed, blowing up Westminster and toppling a future fascist government. Demonstrators in the “Occupy” movement (remember them?) would often don Fawkes masks, too, to suggest that Wall Street, or the Bush administration or the International Monetary Fund were just as tyrannical.

Which brings me around, eventually, to “Gumpowder, Treason and Plot,” a little volume by C. Northcote Parkinson that I turned to, to bone up on the holiday. Published in England in 1976, and in the U.S.A. in 1978, it’s a smart, short history well worth chasing down.

Parkinson (1909-1993) was a naval historian and an authority on the history of Malaya; he wrote a series of adventure novels starring Richard Delancey, a Guernseyman in the Royal Navy in the 170os. He also penned impressive “biographies” of Horatio Hornblower and of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional butler, Jeeves.

His most famous tome, of course, was “Parkinson’s Law” (1957), a mostly tongue-in-cheek analysis of bureaucracy. (The law, incidentally, states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”)

Parkinson could grow serious, though, and “Gunpowder, Treason and Plot” shows him at his focused best.

Beyond a chronicle of the conspiracy, Parkinson offers an intriguing history of counterintelligence in Tudor England. As such it focuses on Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury. who inherited command of Queen Elizabeth’s secret service on the death of her loyal follower, Sir Francis Walsingham.

A short, possibly hunchbacked man — Elizabeth called him “my pygmy” and King James, “my little beagle” — Cecil probably wasn’t the equal of Walsingham or his father, Lord Burghley. He was clever enough, though, and his predecessors had already built a strong spy network before him.

It was a small service; Parkinson estimates it had fewer than a hundred agents, and at times just a few dozen. At the time, however, there were at best no more than 40 Jesuit missionaries — the service’s bête noire — on the loose in England.

And the Tudor spies had it down to a science. Parkinson analyzes how Cecil and his predecessors handled a string of plots against the English throne, the Babbington plot (which allegedly planned to kill Elizabeth and put Mary, Queen of Scots, in her place), the Throckmorton plot and others.

A sort of standard script was worked out. (1. Cecil and his men would recruit a snitch or place a mole in a circle of conspirators. (2. They would give the conspirators time to scheme and prepare to strike. (3. Then, at the very last moment, the Queen’s (or King’s) men would intervene, saving their beloved monarch.

Executions of the plotters and their highborn associates (such as Queen Mary) would follow.

The last-minute business was important. In the public narrative, it suggested that only The Hand of God had spared Elizabeth or James from a horrid death; this emphasized that the queen (or king) was God’s beloved and intended by Him to rule over the land. (Period cartoons show the Eye of God zeroing in on Fawkes as he skulks around London.)

The Gunpowder Plot follows this outline perfectly. Cecil had at least one informant early in the circle around Robert Catesby (the apparent ringleader), Fawkes and others. He and his men knew that one of the plotters had rented the undercroft months before Parliament was to open. He could have rounded up the crew any time.

Instead, Lord Mounteagle supposedly receives an anonymous letter warning him not to attend Parliament. He sends it to King James, who reads the confusing text and deduces wisely that it’s referring to a gunpowder explosion. (This little filigree of detail makes the King look good, and flatters his vanity about his brains.) A search is promptly mounted and voila!

Fawkes is sent to the Tower, tortured meticulously — in the confessions between sessions, you can see the quality of his handwriting deteriorate — and he gives up everyone. The plot prompts a crackdown on Jesuits, new anti-Catholic laws and the 1606 hanging of Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit provincial (chief) for England.

Coda: Little Robert Cecil is made a knight of the Garter.

“Gunpowder, Treason and Plot” reads like a good Le Carre novel. Of course modern counterintelligence units never behave this way — or do they?

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About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.